Babbling about books and plants.

Story-Scribbling Sunday – August 18, 2013

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these… I haven’t done much writing since that last post, either. I almost, almost finished First Fridays, but still haven’t been able to convince myself to sit down and write the last one and a half scenes. I spent a lot of time thinking about the sequel, Fourteen, and actually wrote one scene because it wouldn’t leave me alone. And now that scene has spawned another sequel, tentatively titled Butterfly.

It’s funny… Mandai was always the most frustrating character in Masks, one of my first Kivailo World stories. She just wouldn’t tell me what she wanted to do with her life. Which isn’t really relevant in Masks, because that story ends when she is still a teenager… but I like playing with future scenes in my mind, bits and pieces of a sequel that I don’t actually plan to write (and only partly because Masks is barely half finished), but that nonetheless has a title (Wonder What It’s Like) and a timeline that’s several decades long.

Mandai deciding that she wants to be a photographer sparked the idea for First Fridays and then Fourteen.

But then, Mandai reminded me that what she always wanted to do, before I forced her to take a serious job, was to make music. And she insisted that, in addition to being a photographer, she would also be a moderately successful singer-songwriter.

I spent the rest of the summer with my head full of her songs.

Which is a rather odd, since I’m not a music person at all. So most of the songs don’t actually have a tune, and of most I know only parts, and only a few were even written down, but it just won’t stop. Anything I think about gets turned into a song.

And it’s this, Mandai’s music, that has sparked Butterfly. I know, I have so many other stories I want to write, and many that would be more worth writing, and I’m actually embarrassed to be writing something that is only a silly little love story (not something I would even read), but it is so much fun! Not the plot so much, or even the main characters (to be honest, they actually annoy me a little with all their shyness and insecurities), but the secondary characters. I missed having characters with a sense of humour, and Rhiannon and her group of friends make me laugh.

I just wish I had more time to write – but just now, when I finally feel like doing it again, there are, once again, so many other things I need to do.

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Fun is the only reason you need to write a story! I know it can be a lot of fun to explore something you’d never be interested in through writing a story about it – in your case, music, in my case it was student protest and political (mostly left) ideologies for my JulNo novel. 😛

I wonder if ‘Wonder What It’s Like’ has a German title and what that’d be? And I’m excited to see you’re doing something with ‘Masks’ (since that’s the one you sent me a snippet of years ago)!

I really wish I could get back to “Masks” itself, instead of all those little stories spreading out around it.
I’d have to get my hands on some German Harry Potter books to get a German title for “Wonder What It’s Like”, since it’s part of a quotation (“Wonder what it’s like to have a peaceful life.”)
“Masks” was the MC’s public blog, and “Wonder What It’s Like”, if it ever existed outside of my head, would be her private one, keeping friends and family updated on the stuff that happens in her life… I don’t know if blogs will still be around 20+ years in the future, but that’s how far some of my ideas go. (Well, actually, I even know some stuff that happens to her grandchildren, another few decades further on.)